Friday, November 14, 2014

Think obscure. Think British women writers of the 1930s. Think Dorothy Bowers. WHO?

I don't mind saying that I have become a bit frustrated with a lot of what's out there in crime fiction/mystery writing lately, and so I'm trading in modern for vintage for a while. While my frustration grows in that area,  I've also developed this incredible fascination with British women writers of earlier decades, so when I discovered Dorothy Bowers, I thought, why not give her a try.  I bought her book Postscript to Poison, which was written in 1938, republished by Rue Morgue Press in 2005, and is the subject of a post I just made on the crime page.  So who is Dorothy Bowers?
0915230771
Rue Morgue Press, 2005
originally published 1938
190 pp

British author Dorothy Bowers  died ten years after the publication of this novel from tuberculosis.  Bowers had wanted to "make creative literary work" her career, but found herself the owner of  “a fairly regular spate of rejection slips from various editors”  instead.  She also read a great deal, and discovered an "intermittent" attraction to detective fiction, selecting "only ...the best." She eventually started writing mystery novels herself which ultimately led to her being inducted to the detection club in 1948, but her novels soon went out of print.   Thanks to Rue Morgue Press, her works live on and are widely available.  Sadly, she's been overlooked or forgotten at mainstream crime fiction/mystery  info sites like stopyourekillingme.com, an oversight which, imho, needs to be corrected.

There are a couple of good articles about Bowers that you can find online -- here's one of them, written by author Christopher Fowler for The Independent; another one is found at the website of Rue Morgue Press.  If anyone has any other sources of info, please let me know.  I would love to know more about her. 

anyway - I enjoyed her book, am ready to read another, so if obscure British crime-writing women are up your alley, you may want to check out what I have to say about the book. 

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